I’ve often said that I have the best job at Juice Plus+. I’ve recently revised that statement to be clearer: I have the best job, period! I get to work with our growers, manufacturers, suppliers, and everyone in between. I think that everyone that I talk to has a different idea of the best part of my job, but for me they are all equal. There are such great things about working with the growers in the fields - really seeing exactly where all the goodness starts, but I don’t get any more satisfaction than when one of the products that I have worked on gets a warm welcome from you all. The newest Complete bar flavors are no exception.

In case you aren’t aware, we’ve recently launched two new Complete Nutrition Bar flavors: Dark Chocolate + Fig and Tart Cherry + Honey. Developing these bars was a really fun experience. We knew that we wanted to meld the great taste of our previous Chocolate Mocha and Carrot Cake bars with the great nutritional content of our Apple Raisin and Cranberry Grains bars to make something that would taste great and be great for you.

First, we started looking at what the best-selling bar flavors were and figured out quickly that we needed to have a chocolate option. We felt strongly that we wanted to keep the chocolate dark because it is high in antioxidants, but from previous experience knew that we didn’t want to coat the bar and create messy melting issues during the summer. The first bars that we tasted were OK, but we felt that we could improve them even more by including a little bit of honey to really round out the full flavor profile.

Our main goal at Juice Plus+ is to always include the most healthy, natural ingredients that are produced with as little processing as possible. That limits us from including some non-caloric sweeteners that other people use, like sugar alcohols and artificial sweeteners. It even limits us in using some of the “natural” non-caloric sweeteners like stevia and monk fruit since they can sometimes be overly processed and often have an unbalanced flavor profile that isn’t pleasant alone. Instead, we use what we feel are the least processed ingredients including unrefined organic cane sugar and pure, local honey. Not only do they taste amazing, but they provide some great nutritive benefits as well.

For our second bar, we really wanted to do something different. We thought hard about all of the comments we received about our other bars, and our Complete powders. We decided that we wanted to try a completely (pun intended) allergen free bar. Specifically, a bar that doesn’t contain any of the top 8 food allergens. We looked at this bar from a different perspective since soy is the only complete vegetarian protein and we did not want to imply that this bar was the same nutritionally as other products in the Complete lineup, current and historic. Our focus on this bar was on whole fruits and whole seeds. We felt this would be a fantastic on-the-go snack for anyone needing a little boost in energy to help get them from one meal to the next.

In the end, developing the bars was a great experience for our team at Juice Plus+ and we hope that we’ve created a product that everyone can love as much as we do. Which one are you going to try first? We’d love to hear your feedback!